Counting Ingredients in the Caldron – Room on the Broom

We just love Room on the Broom. It is a great book to read and fun as well. You can see great friends and how everyone helps out the witch. We love to read it over and over. It is a book we keep out all year round and not just for Halloween.

We did a fun counting activity with Room on the Broom. My youngest just loved the part about the caldron and how the witch filled it and made a fun brew. We did an activity that we counted the pieces into the the caldrons and then we counting a random amount in each caldron.

What you need: seasonal Halloween erasers, two dice, stick or pencil to stir with, paper, small caldrons (got ours at target).

Before we started the activities we talked about what each erasers name was so she could use their names while doing the activity. Example: 4 is a candy corn.

Roll & Count

First time through my youngest did the roll two dice activity. The white die told my youngest the eraser and the blue die told her how many of that eraser to put in.

Step 1: Roll both dice.
This is a fun step and lots of fun to see. You can compare the numbers and see what one is bigger and which is smaller. I would make sure she said the names of the numbers and told me the name of the eraser as we went along.

Step 2: Find the eraser and count how many match the die roll and put in the caldron.
This step was a little harder at times for her. She would often match the eraser number with the die roll number and not the blue die for how many she would need.

Step 3: Repeat Step 1 & Step 2 several times
This is an easy step and lots of fun one they get into the rhythm of what they are doing. The first few times can be hard.

Step 4: The next step is to mix up your ingredients in your caldron.
This was lots of fun. We would repeat stir, stir, stir as she mixed them up.

Step 5: Dump it out and count how many of each eraser you have.
This was lots of fun, because of repeating step one and two you could have a mixture of all of them or get eraser you repeated more than the others. We talked about which eraser had the most and which had the least. We talked about how many we had together making a number strings like

We repeated this activity several times and she loved it.

Estimate, Dump & Count

After we finished the first activity of Roll & count she really wanted to do repeat the steps of 4, 5 & 6 from above. So we mixed up all the erasers and filled the caldrons with mystery numbers of erasers.

This was lots of fun to see her mix up the erasers and dump them out. Just before she dumped them out I asked what eraser she thought would have the most in it and how many erasers did she think was there in the whole caldron. This gave her something to think about as we did the activity.

After she dumped the erasers out she started arranging them in rows. We talked about if she was right about the number or not. We compared the different numbers of erasers. We talked about if any of them had the same, the most and the least amount of erasers.